Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

(I forgot to mention that on the trip up, M had been intrigued with some of the water towers and standpipes that had been painted decoratively, to relieve their basic boring function.  She particularly liked one that was painted to resemble a hot-air balloon, and another at Mount Jackson, Virginia that L drew to her attention, painted like a basket of ripe apples.  I’d been asleep when we drove past it on the way up 81, but on the way back L pointed it out, and I agreed it was very well done, and above the level of much water-tower art.)

Sunday morning we started early, meaning to cover the rest of West Virginia and all of Kentucky, stopping at Memphis for the night.  The scenery continued to be gorgeous through the rest of the mountains, and I look forward to going back that way the next time we go east.  L says the route is only fifty miles or so longer than going up I-40, and the lack of traffic on the several I-60s is enough to make the extra mileage MORE than worthwhile.

Early in the day I started flipping round the left side of the radio dial, looking for a station broadcasting Morning Edition.  I didn’t find that, but I did find an absolute treasure:  WOUB radio, which was airing a music program called Below the Salt, an ohmyGODFANTASTIC old-fashioned thematic free-form show, the kind where it’s a challenge and a game to follow the association in the announcer’s head.  We tuned in during the second hour of a three-hour show, and listened for as long as we could keep the signal.  I tell you, when John Aielli finally dies retires from KUT, I think Keith Newman at WOUB would be a fine candidate for a replacement based on breadth of knowledge and taste.  Below the Salt has become my new favorite listening on Sunday morning.

Eastern Kentucky was still hilly and not that different from West Virginia, but after we passed Lexington, it began to flatten out into rolling Upper Midwest kind of country, like Indiana and Illinois.  (L spotted another water tower/tank painted with a Thoroughbred racing scene as we circled past the Lexington airport.)  We stopped for a late lunch at a diner in Elizabethtown that had been decorated in a combination of Rockabilly Fifties Retro and Musician Camp.  Pride of place was given to life-size statues of Jake and Elwood Blues, dancing away in the middle of a planter right in the center of the room.  Lunch finished, we turned west and then south on US 51 to Memphis—perhaps a more valid road for us to travel than US 61 out of the Mississippi Delta.  Lots of rockabilly boys ended up going down 51 to Memphis.  On the way in, we found another really good public radio station, WYPL, which programs lots of local music (and Memphis has a lot of local music available to program).  As it turned out, 51 comes in through a definitely tough-looking part of town that I didn’t have any inclination to poke round, so we just kept driving until we got back to the river.  L pointed out the Pyramid to M again as we went past, and a tug pushing a raft of barges downriver.  I pointed out the railroad bridge to L, and remarked on railroads’ preference for painting the metalwork of their bridges black rather than silver.  They do, but I have no idea why.  Since it was early enough that stopping seemed pointless, we ate supper in West Memphis, then drove on and finally stopped for the night in Little Rock.

Monday we ran for it.  We all wanted to be back home, so sightseeing went by the boards as we sped south on I-30, across the Arkansas line into Texas, and back down US 59.  Our original intention to have lunch in Jefferson foundered on the lack of places to eat in Jefferson, so we went on down to Henderson and had lunch at a cafe-cum-burger place in the middle of town where the locals seem to go.  (I want to go back to Henderson when I have time to spend most of a day wandering round it.  They did their Main Street project right.)  Once we got closer to Austin, L said I really didn’t want to fight my way back through Taylor and Hutto and Round Rock to the interstate, now did I? and I allowed that didn’t sound very entertaining, so she plotted a back-road approach to Austin that involved turning off at Rockdale and going south on US 77 through Lexington and then down FM 696, around the back of the Elgin-Butler brick plant by the clay pits, and out onto US 290 a ways east of Elgin.  From there it was a fast run in through Elgin and Manor, and we got home before six.

And that seemed to be plenty, so we went to bed in our own beds that night.

A cellular inkwell communicates with the electric aardvark in the Western Hemisphere.  Fnord.

Saturday was our last day in Virginia; L planned for us to pick her up as soon as she got out of the conference for the afternoon, and we’d start back at once, driving late into the evening.  So we packed up before going to the conference’s breakfast (again at the Hyatt), then M and I came back, checked out, got the car and packed it, and started back down towards Washington.  L suggested we ought to go see the grist mill at Mount Vernon, which is a couple of miles away from the main house.  Since I didn’t have a navigator this time, I ended up turning the wrong direction coming out of Washington and driving several miles the wrong way on the GW Parkway before realizing my mistake.  Finally I got straight, and a half-hour took us around the mansion and out Route 235 to the mill.  The building is a 1933 reconstruction of the original, which fell into ruin in the middle 1800s, and has only been in fully restored operation since 2002.  Being out of the way, it was almost devoid of tourists and the interpreters seemed quite happy to have someone taking an interest in what they had to show.  A young man in 18th century artisan’s dress and tricorn hat gave a quick history of the mill in Washington’s time, including an explanation that Washington had had to dig a two-mile-long trench from Dogue Run, the nearest waterway, to the mill site to supply it with water.  (The mill’s location was governed not by where the water ran so much as where it would be easiest to transport the flour and meal it produced to cargo ships waiting to load at the river wharf.)

After he was done, we went on into the mill where the miller showed off the machinery and explained how it all worked.  The mill had separate stones for grinding wheat and corn, and a series of Brobdingnagian gears and levers switched the power from one drive to the other.  An odd mechanism I asked about,with cups attached to a continuous belt affair, turned out to be an early example of an automated feed system that brought the grain down from storage bins on the top floor to the milling floor and fed the hoppers.  The miller turned on the corn mill for a few minutes, so we could see the meal falling into the screened sifting tray, and the too-large “shorts” fell into a tub at the end.  M, as usual, was badly intimidated by the sheer size of the machinery once it started going, but didn’t flatly insist we leave.  I picked her up and took her around where she could see the water wheel (a breast wheel, where the water hits the wheel just above axle level and an apron-like piece keeps the water from falling out of the buckets too soon) turning.  And as is usually the case given my family, I spotted a half-dismantled pot still and cooling coil sitting at one side of the room.  The coil was an impressive size, taking up an entire whiskey barrel.  I expect that when the nearby distillery building is finished later this year, it’ll be moved over there.  Oh, yes—the location of Washington’s distillery and cooperage is located a short distance from the mill and is being reconstructed.  The building was 75 by 30 feet, had room for fifty mash tubs, a boiler, and five stills and in 1799, the year of Washington’s death, produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey that earned Washington better than $7,500 profit for the year.  Once the distillery is rebuilt, the Mount Vernon Foundation may restart production for tourist souvenirs.

We drove back into DC, found a quick lunch, then went off to see the other goal of the day:  Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s home.  Some of you may not realize that Arlington House sits in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery, that the cemetery is the original grounds of the mansion, and it was put there by the damyankee gummint, and particularly by an officer who had previously served under Lee, as a calculated insult to him.

These days, to see the house you park at the visitors’ center and either take a tour bus to the top of the hill, or you can walk up a winding half-mile route through the cemetery.  I chose the latter, and we started up Schley Drive toward Custis Walk.  We passed by a sign pointing to the grave of President Taft (one of only two presidents buried at Arlington), and a few steps later I noticed a cluster of headstones sprinkled with stars, a Generals’ Row.  One unpretentious granite stone caught the corner of my eye, and I turned to take a second look, which confirmed the stone carried five stars, of which there have been very very few in the history of the US Armed Forces.  We’d stumbled on the grave of Omar Bradley, last of the five-star general officers and one of five buried in Arlington (two army generals, two admirals, and one air force general).

We carried on up the Custis Walk (actually a long, looping sidewalk alternating with flights of steps), but got distracted by a crowd off to one side.  Thinking I had missed the path, we walked across and unexpectedly found ourselves at President Kennedy’s grave, which I hadn’t really intended to visit.  I stopped for a minute anyhow, removing my cap—which is more than anyone else around me did.  People forget the conventional marks of respect so quickly (or they never even learn them) . . . .

We finished our hike up the hill and reached the house, which is a beautiful Greek Revival structure commanding an unparalleled view of Washington, including a straight shot down Memorial Avenue and across the bridge to the Lincoln Memorial.  The house itself is beautifully maintained, and would have warranted much more viewing time than we could stand to give it, but it is un-air conditioned and the muggy Washington afternoon was just too much.  We walked once through the big house and had to let it go at that.

On the way back down I noticed a pink granite mausoleum inscribed with the name “Lincoln.”  Wondering who it was, I went over and found it was the grave of Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s only son to survive to adulthood, buried in Section 30 with his wife and son.

We drove back out to Crystal City, picked up L from the hotel at four, and started west toward home.  L had decided we should try going home through West Virginia and Kentucky, which neither of us have ever visited, so we started back down the Shenandoah Valley on I-66 and I-81, picking up I-64 around Lexington.  Even with the setting sun to fight, we found this way much emptier and easier to drive than the southern route, and got to Charleston without trouble.  Finding a hotel room was a challenge, as every place we stopped was full up and for no apparent reason, but finally we found a place to light.

Next:  More driving.

Dick van Dyke commanded Attack Force Ethel in the Peloponnesian War.  Fnord.

Friday M and I were still sore, but L made sure M put on a pair of Spandex shorts to alleviate the chafing.  It did, too.  We all walked over to the Hyatt for breakfast, which L had paid for as part of our conference registrations.  It was . . . a hotel-banquet breakfast.  Not outright bad, but certainly not good.  We sat through a certain amount of obligatory award-presenting, then split as soon as we could, going back to the hotel to kill a little time until rush hour was closer to being over.  (Once commuted, twice shy.)

Since we’d found the Magic Rabbit Hole yesterday, M and I walked directly to the Metro station through the Crystal City shops, which was both quicker and cooler than what we did Wednesday.  The train was still crowded, but not nearly as sardined as it had been.

Our first goal was the National Museum of the American Indian, which hadn’t even been built the last time I was in Washington.  We walked past beds planted in traditional Native crops—pole beans, corn, squash, gourds, and tobacco—to reach the entry.  The building looks remarkably nice for a Modern style building; the rusticated limestone facing blocks and wandering, wavy wall profiles, combined with the less-than-regimented plantings and a pleasant little waterfall/water garden running along the north side of the building to give it a more relaxed, Southwestern feel than the Greek Revival porticoes and graceless International Style facades of the surrounding buildings.

Once inside, we looked at a collection of boats in the main rotunda:  a Hawaiian outrigger, a Netsilingmiut kayak, an Aymara totora-reed boat (it looked more like a fancy bodyboard).  They are part of an ongoing program where the museum brings in Native boat-builders to make the traditional craft of their tribes.  M was particularly taken with a bronze statue at one side of the rotunda representing a Chiricahua warrior shooting an arrow into the sky, to carry the tribe’s prayers for rain to the gods.  She said later this was the most memorable thing she saw in the entire museum.  Farther along, M noticed a theater with a film running, and she insisted we go sit down and watch.  The movie turned out to be about the opening festival for the museum in 2004, and had clips of the parades, drumming, dancing, food, exhibits—all the things you do to open a museum these days!  Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a prime mover behind getting the museum relocated from New York to Washington and the current building constructed, marched in the parade in full ceremonial dress, matching equally resplendent museum director Richard West.  (Both are Cheyenne chiefs; Campbell is a member of the Northern band and West of the Southern.)  Watching the movie let us save our feet for a few minutes, and by now that was becoming a consideration.

After the movie ended we went up to the second and third floors and looked at the current displays.  M had fun playing with the interactive touch screens that described the artifacts in the cabinets, as well as giving you 360° views of the ones where you could only see one side.  I was most impressed by the beaded everything, particularly a Lakota woman’s deerhide dress with its yoke completely covered in a geometric design of blue and red seed beads.  I also liked a collection of dolls from contemporary tribal makers in their various styles; I would say “traditional” styles, but I just can’t figure out how a voluptuous blonde female soft doll in a purple string bikini, made by an Oneida artist, is traditional, exactly.

As always, there were just TOO MANY things to see, so we gave up and moved on.  The main staircase was designed so light from a southeastern window with several prisms mounted in it shone across the steps, and as we walked down the sun through one of the prisms was just right to splash a huge rainbow across them.

When we got out it was more or less time for lunch, which we ate at the Air & Space Museum next door.  Air & Space’s cafe turned out to be run by McDonald’s, which pleased M no end because she’d been jonesing for McDonald’s the whole trip.  As usual, the entire museum was a mob scene so I didn’t even try to go through it with her, confining myself to taking her in to see the Wright Flyer, which now has its own dedicated gallery.  (Didn’t used to.)  I explained this was the first airplane that had ever been ever, and how little time had gone by since the first time it flew, adding that all Daddy’s grandparents were born between 1898 and 1902, before it ever left the ground.  I don’t know how much of it registered.  Maybe a little bit.  On the way out, I stopped and lifted her up so she could touch the piece of moon rock that’s mounted in a “touch-me” display at the entrance.

We hiked back across the Mall yet again, to the National Gallery for the Henri Rousseau:  Jungles in Paris exhibition.  The exhibition is only being shown at the National Gallery, and will not travel.  As with the Vermeer exhibition I saw there in 1995 (that’s another tale for another day, that is), I knew that if I didn’t take the chance to see them now I never would get to.

The exhibition was far more varied than I’d expected; besides the “jungle” paintings for which he’s so well known, there were Sunday-art street and country scenes, portraits, promotionals, allegories, and more.  Rousseau, who probably never left France in his life, used published photographs and visits to zoos and botanical gardens extensively for source material, and some of the identifiable sources he used were displayed next to their paintings.  M especially liked Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm), while I was enchanted by his late work The Dream, completed the same year he died.  The only major work I would have wished for that wasn’t included was The Sleeping Gypsy, but I suppose they couldn’t persuade MOMA, to whom it belongs, to let go of it.

By now I was inCREDibly footsore, to the point I suspected I had huge friction blisters on the ball of my right foot.  (I didn’t after all.)  M, who’d been very patient through the National Gallery, was ready to go do something more her speed and had been lobbying hard for another carousel ride.  I decided that yesterday had already ruined my Curmudgeonly, Old-Fartish reputation beyond hope, so we went and rode the carousel again.  This time M wanted a “regular” horse instead of a zebra, so she had that.  The trip back on the Metro was—well, better than Thursday.  We rested at the hotel until L got back from the conference, prouder than a purple pig of the new bra she’d made in class that actually fitted her properly!  When you wear a 42B cup, finding a proper fit is a Really Big Deal and usually means you have to make your own to get it right.  She intends to use this one as a muslin for making others, once she’s gotten the final tweaks done on the fit.

The conference’s style show was Friday evening, so we got dressed (and I Got Dressed, in full kilt but leaving the Prince Charlie jacket in the garment bag in favor of the poet’s shirt, which L thought was better geared to the level of informality) and went across the street to dinner at Chili’s.  On this trip I’ve discovered that Chili’s can usually be trusted to have SOME clue about proper spicing and what you use chiles for, and thank the ghods they put enough cilantro in the pico de gallo for you to taste it!  The restaurant was busy though not slammed; even so, we were late finishing and getting down to the Hyatt, where the show had already started.

The fashion show?  Well, it was a fashion show.  I really liked a few of the pieces, some of them were just utterly opposed to my taste, and we got the occasional dose of makes-yer-teeth-itch sweetness/cuteness.  And of course the committee couldn’t resist telling the DJ providing the music bed to end with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” complete with obligatory party-favor flag waving all over the room (and if you believe it wasn’t obligatory, you didn’t see the crowd).  That brand of jingoist, know-nothing, hyper-patriotism disgusts me.  Jingoism wasn’t right in Queen Victoria’s time, and it still isn’t right now.

Next: George Washington’s gristmill, Robert E. Lee’s house, and leaving Cheyenne Washington.

An asteroid redirects the lawn in platypus-blossom time.  Fnord.

Thursday, L had her first day of the American Sewing Guild conference at the Hyatt down the street, so she hurried off early leaving M and me to take care of ourselves.  We started out to find (a) breakfast and (b) the nearest Metro station.  (a) was accomplished at an undistinguished beanery somewhere in the complex of underground shops, amounting to a subterranean mall, that runs under the office buildings from 23rd Street to 12th Street.  I knew for certain that I was away from the Deep South when I found scrapple on the breakfast buffet steam table.  (It was too heavy on the liver, so not very good.)

Coming out, I got turned around and the first thing I knew we were at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, where L’s conference was going on.  I walked up to a doorman and asked him how to get to the Metro, and he waved a dismissive hand and said “Get in the van.”  I decided this was not the best time to begin a discussion about my not being a hotel guest, so we got in the van.

I’d inadvertently chosen to ride at morning rush hour, so the cars were absolutely PACKED with commuters.  We had to stand for several stops until a young Samaritan noticed us, stood up and gave M her seat.  Most of the commuters FINally got off at the Farragut West station, two stops before ours, so we had a minute or two’s breathing before we had to get off ourselves.  We came up aboveground at the USDA building, two blocks west of the Castle with its gorgeous parterres, at about 9:20.  None of the other museums opens before ten, so we had a little time to kill.  We spent it in the Castle’s snack-bar area, mercifully air-conditioned, and in looking through its exhibits, which are mostly teasers for the constituent museums.  There was an exhibition loaned from NMAH on collectible coins and paper money I found intriguing, but which left M cold; even the shiny REAL GOLD eagles and double eagles weren’t interesting.

Finally ten o’clock came and we walked across to the Natural History museum.  M was torn between admiration of the mounted African elephant in the rotunda and terror at the sheer size of the display.  (After all, elephants in books are rarely as big as the real thing, or even drawn in true proportion.)  In the Dinosaur Hall, though, terror won out.  She simply couldn’t bring herself to be in the same place as an articulated T. rex skeleton, leaning down as though to snap her up.  Instead, we went in to the Mammalian hall, which was full of small (and large) furry animals, with which M was much more at ease.  Many of the African exhibits had animals she knew from The Lion King and Madagascar, so they felt familiar to her.  The Oceanic Hall was closed for remodeling, so I didn’t have the chance to take her in to see the stuffed blue whale suspended from the ceiling.

Later we went down the Mall to the National Museum of American History, where we walked all OVER.  (It was a good thing we went when we did; I just discovered the museum is closing completely after Labor Day for a two-year renovation project.)  We went through the Age of Transportation exhibit and saw high-varnish passenger steam locomotives and farm tractors, woodie station wagons and battered Okie jalopies, tourist cabins and travel trailers, city plans for postwar commuter suburbs and young couples buying a new car because of the “one on the way.”  I made M tag along through an astonishing exhibit of photographs of country music stars taken between 1972 and 1981, at the end of the time when it was still possible to get right up close with your favorite star, tell him how much his music meant to you, get him to sign a publicity photo for your kid, get your picture taken with him, maybe even give him a hug.  (Think about tryin’ to do THAT today with Clint Black, just for example!)  Eventually we had to give up and go because we were both too footsore to keep walking, and M was having problems with her legs chafing.  Back out onto the Mall, and back into heat just as bad and oppressive as the day before at Mount Vernon.

On the way to the Metro, M insisted on having a ride on the carousel that’s been on the south side of the Mall near the Castle since the late 1960s.  She picked out a zebra for her mount, I got up on a regular horse right next to her, and off we went.  (That’s right.  I rode on a carousel.  Me.  At my age.  Deal.)  M, who’d never been on a carousel before, was absolutely delighted.  After that, we both limped back to the Metro station and caught a Blue line train outbound, only to discover the air conditioning was out in our car.  Trains were running behind because of the excessive hot weather, so I didn’t dare get off to wait for the next train, for fear it’d be worse.  We sweltered our way back to Crystal City, picking up clots of commuters along the way and getting hotter and more airless at each stop.  At last we reached our station, got off, and dove into the Crystal City Shops underground mall again, blessed with air conditioning, and were able to walk from the station at 18th Street to 23rd Street before we had to brave the heat again.  Fortunately, the hotel was only two blocks away.

A rest and then an hour of Cartoon Network left us feeling better, so when L showed up we went back out and into Crystal City Shops to find supper.  (It probably deserves its own post, since completely underground malls are uncommon anywhere, but you ain’t gettin’ it from me.)  We ended up at an undistinguished but mostly adequate Tex-Mex place, since M and I were both rebelling at the idea of walking any further than we had to.  Supper done, we went back to the hotel, and so to bed.

Next:  More Smithsonian, with Indians and Rousseau.

There are never any reticulated buttressed epinephrines when you need them.  Fnord.

Monday contained no sightseeing and not much running around.  I slept late, and when I was awake I was working on my mother-in-law’s desktop computer, an Empirical Dementor 4400 that was in dreadful shape after four years of neglect.  Neither she nor my stepfather-in-law had the knowledge or skill to keep it up, and it showed.  The anti-virus client subscription had expired, the hard drive was full of temp files and other trash, and the fragmentation—you don’t want to know.  Even worse, it only has dial-up Net access over a phone line so bad that it connects at 21.6 kbps at best, which made downloading 80MB of Norton applications very VERY painful—as in 12 hours’ worth of painful.  For a miracle, the downloads didn’t abort in the middle, so I could walk away and leave it running rather than having to be right there baby-sitting the whole time.  While the downloads were going on, I worked on cleaning up the drive, tearing out unused applications, dumping temp junk, defragging, and generally acting like a hired consultant.  When I got through, the system was—not well, but better.  It really could have used a backup and clean OS reinstallation that I would have needed a couple more days to do.  My mother-in-law thanked me two or three times for working on it rather than being the vacationing tourist, which was very effusive for her.

That afternoon we all went over to visit L’s grandmother at her assisted-living facility.  Tink is 94, nearly stone-deaf even with hearing aids, and has an osteoporotic hump in her back worthy of Baba Yaga.  M finds her “scary” and would barely have anything to do with her.  I was a little surprised and not pleased to see she has a number of sores that she rubbed at the whole time we were there; I can’t decide whether they’re a result of fragile elderly skin breaking down, decubitus sores, scratching, or a combination.  She’s also lost a LOT of weight since I’ve seen her last.  L’s mother said she was down to 86 pounds (and Tink wasn’t that big to begin with).  About a year ago she decided she was not going to have any more blood transfusions to treat a moderate but persistent anemia, and I’m sure that contributes to the decline as well.  Her main problem, I suppose, is simply old age and there’s a very limited amount to do about that.

Conversation was very difficult and halting, in part because of her deafness and in part for lack of anything to talk about.  Tink gets out very little, and practically none of her nieces and nephews, who mostly live in northern Virginia, write or visit her.  L’s mother and sister go over and visit, and sometimes take her to family gatherings, but she’s not up to interacting much.

Once we got back, we had the entertainment of finding the plumbers had arrived to replace the water heater, which had sprung a leak over the weekend and soaked part of the basement playroom carpet.  (The leak also meant there was only cold water for bathing, so we kind of did without.)  They started wrestling out the old heater and struggling to get the new one down the outside stairs, which were barely wide enough for the job.  The water heater burns fuel oil rather than gas (I’d never heard of such a thing before) and the plumbers didn’t
seem ecstatic about it.  One of them mentioned that they only see an oil-burning heater every two months or so.  Something held them up, so they had to leave the job half-finished at the end of the day and us still with no hot water.

Tuesday we ran down to Catonsville to visit Kelly and Steve in their new (to them) house.  L, M, and Kelly applied themselves to the backyard swimming pool, while Steve and I sat under the awning in the shade and talked.  I discovered a clump of poison ivy they had overlooked, and which I expect they’ve poisoned out by now.  Steve was kind enough to let me borrow one of their computers for a few minutes to check mail and make sure that nothing major had broken loose or needed tending (mostly it hadn’t and didn’t).  Later we went to the Double T Diner on Balto National Pike for a late-ish lunch, and got landed with a stereotypical diner waitress (good at her job, but still stereotypical).  L was at pains to point out to me that the waitress was from South Baltimore rather than Highlandtown, and therefore could not be considered true “hon” material.  Back home for baths (the plumbers finally got through with the water heater, and hot water abounded), dinner with L’s sister and “the cousins,” (if you’re ready for this, we went out to eat at a BOWLING ALLEY, and it wasn’t half bad) and more wrestling with the computer for me.

Wednesday morning we said our goodbyes and drove down to Washington.  Except we didn’t stop at Washington.  We drove on through around the Washington Beltway, across the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, past DC National on the GW Parkway, and all the way down to Mount Vernon.  Of all the days in all the years in all the world to visit Mount Vernon, this was one of the really inauspicious ones.  Temperatures pushing 100°, humidity above 60%, barely a breath of wind.  We did get there relatively early, so we had the advantage of what cooler air there was, but that wasn’t much.  L quickly gave up on the idea of touring the inside of the big house, as the waiting line was already far longer than M would have stood for.  Instead we walked around the English garden and admired the peaches and pears that are just now setting good fruit, the citrus and banana trees in tubs so they could be moved back into the orangery for winter (one of the lime trees had put on a nice crop), and the vegetable gardens.  The garden is being excavated this summer, so we got to watch a gang of grubby, sweaty, well-built female graduate students wearing not very much clothing (and that worn and tattered) working away at scraping down something that looked like a midden or a filled-in well with trowels and brushes, sifting huge sieves of excavated dirt through screens to capture pottery shards and other discarded bits, drawing the position of every artifact unearthed on gridded notepads.  I’m not a fan of grubby, but I did appreciate the well-built and not very much clothing parts of it.

The compound was in a maintenance cycle, so the house’s walls were being scraped preparatory to repainting.  In the tradition of social climbers everywhere, Washington built the house of planks carved to resemble sandstone blocks (the technical term is “rusticated”), then had it painted white and handfuls of sand flung onto the still-tacky paint to give that just-quarried texture.  These days, the painters use sprayers that mix the sand and paint before it’s applied.  There were also crews up on all the roofs, climbing around replacing and repainting weak or rotted fish-scale cypress shingles.  I didn’t envy them their perches.

Passing on the house meant we spent a bunch of time walking around and looking into the dependencies:  kitchen, laundry, smokehouse, storehouse, carriage house, and stables.  Wherever possible L and I tried to relate things M was seeing to things and events in the Little House books, which L has been reading to her on and off.  That worked fairly well since farm technology just didn’t change that much between 1770 and 1870.  By the end M was drooping pretty badly in the heat, as was I, but L herded us down the hill past the orchard (peaches, pears, cherries, apples) all the way to the bank of the Potomac, and onto an AIR-CONDITIONED! tour ship, which took us up and across the river about fifteen minutes, as far as Piscataway Creek,  Fort Washington and its lighthouse (yes, I have a soft spot for the Chesapeake lights), and then back.  The iceboxy air conditioning on board did wonders for M and me, so we were able to face the job of climbing up the fifty-foot bluff from the river, and all the way back to the car.  By this point it was late enough our hotel room was available, so we drove to Crystal City, wearily checked in, and collapsed for a couple of hours.  Later, we ventured out and discovered a neat little Restaurant Row on 23rd Street just across the Jefferson Davis Highway (AKA US Route 1).  We ended up picking a small Salvadoran restaurant where we were the only non-Hispanics present (and almost the only diners present, too, which was a pity).  The food was a nice change from anything we find at home; I had an tender and excellent dish of lengua asada (stewed beef tongue).  L’s carne asada wasn’t quite such a success; we’re accustomed to a soupier version than what she was served, although its flavor was good.

Next:  The Smithsonian, and M rides the Metro with Daddy.

Comrade Kosygin met the tyrannosaur to hand over plans for a meteoric bomb.  Fnord.

A few of you (besides Melanie, who knows already and knows why) may have noticed I’ve been missing.  This was not because I had nothing to say, but because I had no way to post it.  I was ABENDed while I went with L and M on a Journey to the East.  (T wasn’t along; she’s on her own solo Journey to the East this week.)  We rented a car (a sangría-colored Chrysler Sebring; nice enough, but the cruise-control kickdown gear needs BIGtime help, as we discovered up in the hills) since T needed Quinn for her own Journey.  I shared driving duties with L for the first time; normally I’m a poor passenger and hitherto insisted on driving myself.

We left Austin on Friday the 28th about two in the afternoon.  We’d meant to leave at noon, but a sluggish remote server at the Empire meant I had to stop there for a few minutes to submit my timecard.  (Getting paid regularly is a Good Thing.)  Getting out beyond Taylor on US 79 was a struggle (ye gods, that area has built up so much!), but after that running was RELatively clear on 79 and Texas 43 all the way to Marshall and US 59, which is NEVer clear.  We got to Texarkana after sunset, stopped for dinner, then ran up I-30 to Little Rock.  For the first time in ever, none of the interstates in Arkansas was under construction.  Used to be that we could count on at least a hundred miles’ worth of traffic-barreled misery through the state.

Tuesday involved driving through the second half of Arkansas and all of Tennessee.  Getting through Tennessee involves I-40, which, right behind I-35, has got to be the worst interstate highway I’ve ever had to do with.  Even I-10 is only ugly to deal with in cities like Houston; I-35 and I-40 are evil no matter where you get onto them.  We intended to stop and see Melanie and MisterX, but between the usual I-40 traffic, a pissing-down rainstorm that slowed traffic in western Tennessee to 40 mph in places, a badly-delayed lunch at a Shoney’s in Nashville (one of the line cooks stomped out in a huff, leaving the duty manager trying desperately to cover and not really succeeding), and me not reading the map correctly which caused us to miss the turn off I-81, we didn’t get there until almost eight in the evening.  Nonetheless, we had a very good if limited visit, and M got a needed chance to play with Storm and one of her friends.  M was hopelessly bored through much of the trip but lacking books, which she can’t yet read, or a seat full of toys there wasn’t much we could do about it.  We had a late dinner at a Perkins “family restaurant” near our hotel; the restaurant’s bleedin’ thermostat was set to “icebox” and we got landed with a thoroughly couldn’t-give-a-shit waitron.  Fortunately the food was adequate, which is more than I can say for the soi-disant ambience.

Friday we got going fairly early; since we’d lost an hour when we crossed time zones on Saturday, L decided we should get up at 0700 instead of 0600.  Breakfast at Perkins proved that while the freezing AC hadn’t changed, the staff had and we got a very nice and attentive waitron who got a better-than-usual tip from me because of it.  (The previous night’s disaster disgusted me so that I only tipped five percent, barely enough to make it clear it was a studied expression of dissatisfaction and insult.)  We ran on up the Shenandoah Valley on I-81, through the panhandle of West Virginia, and turned right at Hagerstown, Maryland onto I-70.  Which was its usual clogged self, I may say, including a completely inexplicable mile-long semi-traffic jam (L contended it was because of a long downslope leading into a sharp turn that made people dump their brakes, causing the backups).  We fought our way through Howard County, noting on the way (well, I noted) that the Howard County Fair is going on this week; the midway food booths were already being placed and set up.  L had printed directions from Yahell for how to get to L’s mother’s house in Fallston (L hasn’t been there in several years and I haven’t been to visit since before her mother and late stepfather moved from Virginia), and her mother had made recommendations for a more pleasant Scenic Route across Baltimore and Harford counties, but L ended up doing variations on it (some because she missed a corner and some because I think she thought She Knew Better) and we wandered around some before finally arriving.  When we pulled in, we found L’s BIL (her sister’s husband) and their three kids already there; they’d come over from their house in Forest Hill, a few minutes away.  The oldest, now 15, used to be rather bossy but has now turned into someone I rather think I like.  The middle and younger ones, 10 and 9, almost immediately took to M and the three of them played together in various groupings almost all the time.  L’s mother had mixed a pitcher of sangría to which I did significant damage during the evening; in a little while L’s sister showed up and we all had a picnicky kind of dinner on the grounds it was too hot to cook.  It was hot by Maryland standards; high nineties and low hundreds with a fifty-percent humidity, which made it feel all the worse.

More Baltimore (such as it was) in the next post.

In the self-evident notebook, the gimme cap is a power cell.  Fnord.